Stories

Mad Mimi is an email service that lets you elegantly create, send, and track all of the emails that your business (or client!) needs. Over 17,000 businesses use Mad Mimi to handle email the simple way. With mad_mimi_mailer, Mad Mimi now gives Rails apps an out-of-the-box transactional email API that's even easier than doing it yourself. You can also follow MadMimi on twitter to see what she's up to.

The CodeRack Middleware contest has begun and they're encouraging Ruby programmers to create and submit their own Rack Middleware. They've got around $3000 worth of prizes ready to hand out to the most useful and interesting submissions.

Anthony Eden released Refinery, a distributed processing framework written in Ruby, which is also JRuby compatible. Refinery interfaces with Amazon SQS and S3 to distribute work across multiple servers.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz wrote a recipe for the Chef deployment framework called Chef-Deploy. It's being used at Engine Yard and basically gives you Capistrano-like automated deployments via Chef. But, since it's part of Chef, you gain better system support and verification as well as simple application deployment.

Rails development is still going strong and there are a few recent changes that you should know about. First, Rails will now escape any strings passed into your views, by default (think h("foo")). An second, the content_tag_for helper will now append the optional CSS prefix to the generated CSS CLASS, as well as the CSS ID, as before. Rails 3 development is still going strong and, as always, there are more refinements and syntactic sugar to love.

This week we talk about stylesheet abstraction, testing named scopes, and storing logs in a database. Also, the WindyCity Rails videos are out, a new version of Spree has been released, and FiveRuns is no more.

RailsConf 2010, the architecture of GitHub's move to Rackspace, Twitter's experience with Ruby Enterprise Edition, and Red Hat's Deltacloud API are covered in this Tuesday episode of Ruby5. Also covered is Validatious on Rails, MonkeySupport, and a reminder to upgrade your installation of nginx.